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International audience ; Never has sovereignty been as fashionable as since its explanatory and normative force first came into doubt and its knell was tolled in the European Union. With the shift in authority away from the state to new sub-state, supra-state, post-state and non-state entities, an important question is whether the concept of ultimate authority or sovereignty is to be abandoned or, on the contrary, retained and, if so, in which form. This paper aims at exploring a third way that would allow us to escape from the two types of dualism that contrast state and sovereignty, first, and rejecting and saving sovereignty, second. This paper's argument is that sovereignty is neither the simple reflection of the new European and international reality nor the application of a pre-established concept whose criteria are immutable and risk corseting the post-national order. As an essentially contestable concept, sovereignty is at once a state of affairs, a question pertaining to the nature and justification of that state of affairs and a justification of the latter. The correct use of the concept of sovereignty consists therefore in constantly contesting one's conceptions of the concept and hence one's exercize of sovereignty. As such, the reflexive concept of sovereignty can be described as cooperative in the post-national constellation where sovereign entities overlap in their claims to sovereignty over the same territory and population. Read together with the principle of subsidiarity, cooperative sovereignty implies allocating competences to those authorities that are best placed to ensure the protection of shared sovereign values and principles, such as the values of democracy and fundamental rights. In the European context, cooperative sovereignty provides the normative framework for the development of a dynamic and reflexive form of constitutionalism. Through its duties of cooperation and coherence, cooperative sovereignty countervails the risks of erosion implied by constitutional pluralism, while also ...

International audience ; Never has sovereignty been as fashionable as since its explanatory and normative force first came into doubt and its knell was tolled in the European Union. With the shift in authority away from the state to new sub-state, supra-state, post-state and non-state entities, an important question is whether the concept of ultimate authority or sovereignty is to be abandoned or, on the contrary, retained and, if so, in which form. This paper aims at exploring a third way that would allow us to escape from the two types of dualism that contrast state and sovereignty, first, and rejecting and saving sovereignty, second. This paper's argument is that sovereignty is neither the simple reflection of the new European and international reality nor the application of a pre-established concept whose criteria are immutable and risk corseting the post-national order. As an essentially contestable concept, sovereignty is at once a state of affairs, a question pertaining to the nature and justification of that state of affairs and a justification of the latter. The correct use of the concept of sovereignty consists therefore in constantly contesting one's conceptions of the concept and hence one's exercize of sovereignty. As such, the reflexive concept of sovereignty can be described as cooperative in the post-national constellation where sovereign entities overlap in their claims to sovereignty over the same territory and population. Read together with the principle of subsidiarity, cooperative sovereignty implies allocating competences to those authorities that are best placed to ensure the protection of shared sovereign values and principles, such as the values of democracy and fundamental rights. In the European context, cooperative sovereignty provides the normative framework for the development of a dynamic and reflexive form of constitutionalism. Through its duties of cooperation and coherence, cooperative sovereignty countervails the risks of erosion implied by constitutional pluralism, while also ...

We see a disposition in some quarters of the Democratic party to discuss the question of Squatter Sovereignty as applied to the Nebraska Bill.

This article explores how International Relations (IR) might better conceptualise and analyse an underexplored but constitutive relationship between race and sovereignty. I begin with a critical analysis of the 'orthodox account' of sovereignty which, I argue, produces an analytical and historical separation of race and sovereignty by: (1) abstracting from histories of colonial dispossession; (2) treating racism as a resolved issue in IR. Against the orthodox account, I develop the idea of 'racial sovereignty' as a mode of analysis which can: (1) overcome the historical abstractions in the orthodox account; (2) disclose the ongoing significance of racism in international politics. I make this argument in three moves. Firstly, I present a history of the 17th century struggle between 'settlers' and 'natives' over the colonisation of Virginia. This history, I argue, discloses the centrality of dispossession and racialisation in the attendant attempts of English settlers to establish sovereignty in the Americas. Secondly, by engaging with criticisms of 'recognition' found in the anticolonial tradition, I argue that the Virginian experience is not simply of historical interest or localised importance but helps us better understand racism as ongoing and structural. I then demonstrate how contemporary assertions of sovereignty in the context of Brexit disclose a set of otherwise concealed colonial and racialised relations. I conclude with the claim that interrogations of racial sovereignty are not solely of historical interest but are of political significance for our understanding of the world today.

Dual Identity, Joint sovereignty, the spread of regional and supranational entities and the end of the nation state as we know It... The Good Friday Agreement makes a nonsense of warring nationalities and begs us to reconsider the notion of exclusive territorial sovereignty

Over the last decade, digital sovereignty has become a central element in policy discourses on digital issues. Although it has become popular in both centralised/authoritarian and democratic countries alike, the concept remains highly contested. After investigating the challenges to sovereignty apparently posed by the digital transformation, this essay retraces how sovereignty has re-emerged as a key category with regard to the digital. By systematising the various normative claims to digital sovereignty, it then goes on to show how, today, the concept is understood more as a discursive practice in politics and policy than as a legal or organisational concept.

YET IN PRACTICE IN INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS THE CONCEPT OF ABSOLUTE SOVEREIGNTY IS A TATTERED ANACHRONISM. THE AUTHORS CAN SET ASIDE CONDOMINIUMS. THE TWO PAST EXAMPLES AFFECTING THE BRITISH EMPIRE AND COMMONWEALTH, NAMELY, THE ANGLO-EGYPTIAN CONDOMINIUM IN THE SUDAN AND THE ANGLO-FRENCH CONDOMINIUM IN THE NEW HEBRIDES, WERE NOT ENCOURAGING. THE FIRST WAS A ONESIDED AFFAIR IN WHICH ALL THE EFFECTIVE AUTHORITY WAS EXERCISED BY THE STRONGER PARTNER, IN OTHER WORDS A SHAM; THE SECOND WAS A DEMONSTRATION OF MUDDLE, IN WHICH THE SOVEREIGNTY ISSUE WAS DELIBERATELY OBSCURED. THE WEAR AND TEAR OF SOVEREIGNTY, HOWEVER, GOES MUCH FURTHER THAN SUCH MARGINAL INSTANCES OF APPARENT BISECTION.

Sovereignty has become controversial. The idea and practice of sovereignty are said to be increasingly undermined by the simultaneous transnationalization and localization of political, economic, and cultural space. Not only is the ability of states to control their boundaries gradually erased, but given political boundaries seem unable to account for or define the dynamics of social life. At the same time, sovereignty is indicted as supportive of inequality, internal oppression, external imperialism, racism, and ecological destruction, among other unsavoury features of international social life. In this view, sovereignty is condemned as an ethically deficient way of organizing the international community. This is a confusing and contradictory picture. On the one hand, the boundaries defined by sovereignty appear increasingly irrelevant to international society, and on the other, the very power of sovereignty to demarcate boundaries is decried.

Sovereignty has returned as a central concern in anthropology. This reinvention seeks to explore de facto sovereignty, i.e., the ability to kill, punish, and discipline with impunity. The central proposition is a call to abandon sovereignty as an ontological ground of power and order in favor of a view of sovereignty as a tentative and always emergent form of authority grounded in violence. After a brief account of why the classical work on kingship failed to provide an adequate matrix for understanding the political imaginations of a world after colonialism, three theses on sovereignty—modern and premodern—are developed. We argue that although effective legal sovereignty is always an unattainable ideal, it is particularly tenuous in many postcolonial societies where sovereign power historically was distributed among many forms of local authority. The last section discusses the rich new field of studies of informal sovereignties: vigilante groups, strongmen, insurgents, and illegal networks. Finally, the relationship between market forces, outsourcing, and new configurations of sovereign power are explored.